Student News

If you have an event, publication, award, or other item that you would like to highlight on the English Department website, click here.

Matthew Vetter Awarded the Claude Kantner Graduate Fellowship

Announcement for 04-14-2014

The English Department is proud to announce that Ph.D. candidate Matthew Vetter received the Claude Kantner Graduate Fellowship for the 2014-15 academic year. This fellowship is awarded to only five graduate students throughout the entire university.

In 2003, the Executive Council of the MLA created the MLA International Bibliography Fellowship. The fellowships help recognize the efforts of scholars who index materials on behalf of the MLA International Bibliography. As partial demonstration of the rigor, only five scholars have completed the fellowship requirements of serving three years as a field bibliographer. This year Craig A. Meyer, a PhD Candidate in the OU Rhetoric and Composition program, became the sixth. He received the award at the MLA Award Ceremony this January in Boston.
Additionally, Craig has also published his article "Disability and Accessibility: Is There an App For That?" in Computers and Composition Online. According to the abstract, the "essay considers mobile learning or m-learning that takes place through various applications and platforms that have potential and productivity within disabled communities and posits their importance to learning the communication skills critical once students matriculate and eventually graduate from the university system." You can read the article here.

Alison Stine’s Wait Picked as One of Five Finalists for Ohioana Book Award

The Ohioana Book Awards began in 1942 to bring state and national attention to Ohio authors and their books. Each year, up to six awards may be given to provide recognition and encouragement to authors for outstanding books in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Juvenile Books, Poetry, and About Ohio or an Ohioan.

John Whicker’s “Narratives, Metaphors, and Power-Moves”

Announcement for 06-01-2012

Ph.D. student John Whicker's article "Narratives, Metaphors, and Power-Moves: The History, Meanings, and Implications of 'Post-Process'" was published in JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics. 31.3-4 (2012). The table of contents for the issue can be found here.

Bryan Lutz featured in “Faces of Pride”

Announcement for 05-25-2012

MA candidate Bryan Lutz is featured in the 2012-2013 edition of "Faces of Pride," hosted by Ohio University's LGBT Student Center.

Faces of Pride invites students and faculty to have their photos taken so they can be identified as GLBTQQIA or as an ally. The LGBT Center began producing Faces of Pride Posters in 2002 after being inspired by a similar project at Kenyon College to raise awareness of LGBT discrimination. Mickey Hart, the director of the center says of the project, "I believe that in order to continue to foster that welcoming environment
each one of us needs to support diversity not as an initiative, but as a commitment that we renew each and every day. Standing as a either a member or an ally is just one way to achieve that."

David Fritts, “The Warrior Gets Married”

Announcement for 05-25-2012

The Public and the University Community are invited to hear David Fritts’s defense of his Dissertation “The Warrior Gets Married: Constructing the Masculine Hero in Beowulf and Chretien de Troyes’ Erec et Enide”. On Wednesday, May 30, 2012, 2:00 O’clock in Ellis Hall 113.
David Fritts earned a B.A. in English from the University of Miami and an M.A. from Ohio University. His dissertation compares the different masculine ideals represented by the heroes in the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and the first Arthurian romance, Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide. Beowulf represents a stereotypical ideal of masculinity that is almost too obvious to talk about—enormous strength and prowess demonstrated by violent action that defeats monsters. The Arthurian heroes that emerge in the twelfth century and resonate with audiences through subsequent centuries offer a masculine ideal that, in addition to acts of violent prowess, emphasizes the hero’s role as a lover. Lancelot, whose story of love for Arthur’s queen is told in Chrétien’s Le Chevalier de la Charrete, exemplifies such a hero. However, it is marriage, and not illicit love, that redefines the masculine literary hero. In Chrétien’s first romance, the conflict between Erec’s relationship with his wife and his role as a leader is resolved when he fully embraces his role as husband. During the time that Chrétien wrote his romances, the Church redefined marriage as a personal relationship formed by the choice of the couple. At the same time, marriage became an important means of gaining status for young men. As a result, the new literary ideal of manhood reflects the need to attract a wife and maintain a successful marriage. Despite the differences emphasized by this context, Erec achieves manhood by performing a masculinity that has more in common with Beowulf than not. Both heroes balance extreme physical prowess with wisdom associated with femininity. And both heroic models ultimately serve to perpetuate the larger community. Dissertation Committee
Director: Josephine Bloomfield, Associate Professor of English
Committee: Marsha Dutton, Professor of English, Andrew Escobedo, Associate Professor of English Mary Jane Kelly, Associate Professor of Spanish

Alison Stine a finalist for the 2012 Ohioana Book Award

Announcement for 05-18-2012

PhD Candidate Alison Stine's second book of poems, WAIT (published in 2011 by the University of Wisconsin Press), is one of five finalists for the 2012 Ohioana Book Award, given by the Ohioana Library. The award is designed to bring national attention to Ohio authors and their books. 800-1,000 published books each year are eligible for the book awards. The winners will be announced later this summer, and recipients will be honored at the annual Ohioana Awards Ceremony.

Ashley Evans, “140 Characters or Bust”

Announcement for 05-04-2012

MA candidate Ashley Evans presented "140 Characters or Bust: The Effect of Twitter on Generation Y and Formal Composition Methods" at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in St. Louis.

Geri Lipschultz wins 2012 Fiction Prize

Announcement for 05-04-2012

Ph.D. student Geri Lipschultz was awarded the 2012 Fiction Prize from the journal So to Speak. Her short story "Slow Dance of the Heart" will appear in the fall issue.

So to Speak: a feminist journal of language and art publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art that lives up to a high standard of language, form, and meaning.The journal was founded in 1993 by an editorial collective of women MFA candidates at George Mason University.

Christopher Sims, “Technology Anxiety in British and American Science Fiction”

Announcement for 04-22-2012

The Public and the University Community are invited to hear Christopher Sims’ Defense of his Dissertation titled “Technology Anxiety in British and American Science Fiction: Artificial Intelligences as Catalysts for Ontological Awakening.” The defense is on Friday, April 20, 2012 at 3:00pm in Ellis Hall, 113.
Christopher Sims received his B.A. in English from The Ohio State University and his M.A. in English from Ohio University. His dissertation, “Technology Anxiety in British and American Science Fiction: Artificial Intelligences as Catalysts for Ontological Awakening,” emerged from studying how authors represent the tension between our increasing dependence on technology and our mounting fears about the consequences of this dependency. This project specifically examines the representation of technology anxiety human subjects feel when encountering artificial intelligences in four British and American SF novels: 1) Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 2) William Gibson’s Neuromancer, 3) Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, 4) David Mitchell’s The Cloud Atlas. While many critical (and popular) investigations of these novels focus on the dangerous and negative implications of AIs, this work uses Martin Heidegger's later writings on technology to argue that AIs might be more usefully read as catalysts for human ontological realignment. Such a transformation leads technologically saturated humans away from an imperious ontology of “enframing” that Heidegger sees as the danger of modern technology and toward the saving power that changes the human posture with respect to beings from a colonial, domineering stance to a pious posture of abetting. The work concludes that it is not enough simply to read the danger AIs pose without seeing the salvation they also reveal.
Dissertation Committee is comprised of director George Hartley, Associate Professor of English, Joseph McLaughlin, Associate Professor of English, Kasia Marciniak, Associate Professor of English, and Robert Briscoe, Assistant Professor of Philosophy.

Bryan Lutz’s “Composing to Change Nations”

Announcement for 04-10-2012

The English Department is proud to recognize MA candidate and Instructor Bryan Lutz for his recent publication “Composing to Change Nations: Teaching New Media and the Arab Spring in First-Year Composition.” The webtext was published in the Spring, 2012 issue of the internet periodical Computers and Composition Online.

From the introduction by senior editor Dr. Kristine Blair, "Bryan Lutz’s “Composing to Change Nations: Teaching New Media and the Arab Spring in First-Year Composition” bridges the gap between the academic and the political in his call to harness the power of social movements online in our own writing classrooms through blogs and other Web 2.0 tools."

Geri Lipschultz’s “Grace Before the Fall”

Announcement for 03-29-2012

The Public and the University Community are invited on Thursday, April 12, 2012, where Geri Lipschultz will defend her dissertation titled “Grace Before the Fall” at Five O’clock in Ellis Hall 113. Her dissertation follows a flaneuse on her journey toward love and social activism.
Geri Lipschultz received her B.A. from the University of Massachusetts and her M.F.A. in Fiction from the University of Iowa. Her dissertation, a novel titled Grace Before the Fall, follows a flaneuse on her journey toward love and social activism. Time: the summer before Ronald Reagan will be elected, before American hostages in Tehran will be freed. Place: a tense and cynical New York City. Enter Grace Rosinbloom, with her own brand of social consciousness. She is a former scholar, a young woman of many charms and more than a few quirks of character. She frequents bars and seconds as an underground actress, but she has become disenchanted with the nightlife; she is lonely. Nor does her day job as a civil servant seem sufficient to satisfy her desire to make a difference in the world. She retreats to the lavish recesses of her recurring dream, which features Grace herself as an award winner of sorts: she, or shall we say her body, is selected to be the “recipient” of Nobel Prize-winning sperm. This is a dream whose progression offers her both romance and meaning. But her real life begins to mirror the dream life when she meets a man who resembles the dream lover and she finds herself privy to classified government documents. She makes a correction in her world and in the process finds her voice. This story has the romance of Cinderella and the righting a wrong that we find in Hamlet. Like Hamlet’s, her mission concerns the acquisition of knowledge—or what to do about what you know.
The novel is marked by its use of the magic realist mode and by the presence of endnotes that came about during extensive revision. In her critical introduction, “Resurrecting Grace Before the Fall: Why Kiss the Corpse,” Lipschultz confronts both the instability and the virtual death of a text (drawing on Robert Scholes and Gayatri Spivak), as well as its revival in the hands of a contemporary reader. Lipschultz positions herself as a new reader in her revision/revival/revitalization of an old text—whose title, contents, and structure have been altered from their original construction thirty years past. She documents her course of revision, which begins with a rupture, itself a consequence of her impulse to investigate the etymology of selected words. Part of her work is an interrogation of the nature of revision itself, which might boil down to the adage offered by Heraclitus: You cannot step into the same river twice.
Dissertation Committee: Director: Zakes Mda, Professor of English
Dinty W. Moore, Professor of English
Janis Butler Holm, Associate Professor of English
Sherrie Gradin, Professor of English
Miriam Shadis, Assistant Professor of History

Jason Jordon’s The Dying Horse

Announcement for 03-16-2012

The English Department is proud to recognize the latest publication from Ph.D. candidate Jason Jordan. Jason's novella The Dying Horse was published by Main Street Rag. His previous books are Cloud and Other Stories and Powering the Devil's Circus: Redux, both with Six Gallery Press. You a review here.

Matt Vetter Pioneers New University Archive Project

Announcement for 02-23-2012

Ph.D. Candidate Mathew Vetter's has pioneered a new Ohio University archive project that brings the wealth of information contained in The Mahn Center to the online encyclopedia "Wikipedia." This project, part of his "ENG 308J: Writing and Rhetoric II" course is the product of a collaboration between Vetter and head of art and archives, Sara Harrington. The project gives students a chance to explore their own research interests within the archives, while also engaging with a digital community of Wikipedia ambassadors. The result is a wealth of information that is both free and public.

"I feel like traditional writing assignments are designed for a teacher created environment. Students don't get to engage with real audiences," says Vetter, "When students are just writing for the teacher or the assignment, they are not doing any work that is going to engage them on any real level. I wanted to give them the opportunity to engage with multiple audiences." Speaking of the project, Vetter adds, ""It really gives students an awareness of materiality of information and how that materiality influences our processing, understanding, and our interpretation of information." Read the full compass story here.

Grade Inflation (And What We Cam Do About It)

Announcement for 02-23-2012

The English Department invites faculty and graduate students to a colloquium on the complications of grade inflation amongst American Universities. Guest speakers are Professor Marsha Dutton, recipient of the HTC Distinguished Tutor Award and HTC Helen Coast Hayes Award, and Professor Loreen Giese, recipient of the University Professor Award, Presidential Teacher Award, and State of Ohio Excellence in Education Award. This meeting with take place on Friday, March 9 from 10:00·12:00 in Ellis Hall, room 24. All Ph.D. students are required to attend; all M.A. students are cordially invited!

Lydia McDermott’s “Sonogram: A Rhetoric of Echo-Location”

Announcement for 02-21-2012

On Monday, March 5 Lydia McDermott will defend her dissertation titled “Sonogram: A Rhetoric of Echo-Location.” Her dissertation traces the conceptual genealogies of the terms “form” and “voice” in relation to rhetoric/writing and to sexed bodies. This event is open to faculty and graduate students. Please join us Two O’clock in Ellis Hall, room 113.
Lydia McDermott received her BA in English literature from Ohio University in 2000 and her MA in creative writing/poetry from Ohio University in 2007. Her Dissertation Committee is comprised of Director: Sherrie Gradin, Professor of English, Mara Holt, Associate Professor of English, Albert Rouzie, Associate Professor of English, and Susan Burgess, Professor of Political Science.
From the abstract, "An ultrasound machine searches the interior contours of a body, bouncing sound off tissue, creating a fuzzy electronic image of space and sound: a sonogram. This work is a sonogram of voice bouncing off form, creating a counter-picture of a history of exclusions in Rhetoric and Composition. I assert throughout the dissertation that “form” and “voice” are always already gendered terms, and that writing also relies on sex and gender for meaning. I find evidence for this in classical rhetorical theorists such as Plato, Aristotle, and Quintilian, as well as in biological or gynecological treatises of the time period. According to such theorists, one of the central problems of women’s bodies and subsequently of their writing is their formlessness, their inability to be pinned down, their proclivity to leak across barriers. I argue, like many feminist rhetoricians and theorists before me such as Anne Carson, Miriam Brody, and Adrianna Cavarero, that the female voice has been characterized as dangerous and irrational, based largely on the classical conception of their leaky bodies. Female voices have therefore been quite literally ephemeral in the long history of writing, though key interventions by scholars like Cheryl Glenn, Andrea Lunsford, and Susan Jarratt have sought to rediscover these voices. Because of this history of exclusion, I advocate for voice as a viable metaphor in writing, if it can be disassociated from essentialism. I draw on the mythological figure of Echo as a potentially transformative trope for writing and rhetoric, precisely because she creates her own form, separate from her body, through voice alone. After examining some of the rhetorical strategies of women writing about gynecological concerns—including an eighteenth-century midwife, a nineteenth-century doctor, Mary Shelley, and the twentieth-century Boston Women’s Health Book Collective—I suggest that Echo absorbs and resounds masculine and feminine voices, providing a potential transgender (as in above, beyond, transitioning) figure for writing that is more inclusive than adopting the dominant discourse or accepting a non-dominant position in rhetoric. Echo offers us a figure that can reclaim voice as an important metaphor in writing without claiming essentialism."

Garrison Gondek is a second -year MA student in fiction from Avon Lake, Ohio. Jim Nelson is a MA student in fiction. He is from Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he received BAs in Creative Writing and German at Western Michigan University. Sarah Green is a PhD candidate in creative writing. Her poems have appeared in Field, Gettysburg Review, Redivider, H-ngm-n, Forklift Ohio and other magazines. She was the recipient of a 2009 Pushcart Prize. They were introduced by Emily Grekin, Cameron Kelsall, and Becca Lachman, respectively.

Ph.D. candidate Sarah Einstein will give a presentation about how to understand disabilities apart from and within the composition classroom.

Disability Studies challenges us to acknowledge that what is disabling about impairments is always defined by the social/societal context in which the exceptional body
exists. Join this conversation on the composition classroom as a location for embodied experience and an opportunity for building inter-dependent community.

"Cripping Our Classrooms: Disability Studies and Composition Pedagogy" will take place on Friday, February 17th at 10am-11am in Room 319, Alden Library.

Kelly Furguson is the First Speaker at Alden Library’s Graduate Research Series

Announcement for 02-10-2012

Ph.D. candidate Kelly Kathleen Ferguson will speak about her research for her recently published book My Life as Laura at 1 p.m. Friday, Feb. 17th. Ferguson is the first to speak as part of the Graduate Research Series hosted by the Ohio University Library.

In an interview with the Compass staff Ferguson says, "I love talking about the research that went into the book, so it'll be a treat to speak for an appreciative audience. Although I wrote the book for a popular audience, it's nice to have the considerable work I did recognized [in an academic setting]."

The event will be located in the Friends of the Libraries Room on the third floor of Alden Library. Everyone is welcome to attend and refreshments will be provided. Click to see the full Compass story.

Sarah Green, a PhD candidate, was poet-in-residence for Mandoline Whittlesey's Embodied Writing week-long poetry retreat in Montmelard, France, in October. Sarah is a co-editor of the online literary journal Octave, which features poetry and fiction by musicians who write and by writers who make music.

MA Students’ Forthcoming Publications in Foothill: Journal of Poetry

Announcement for 11-02-2011

Cameron Kelsall's "Reflecting on a Picture of John Berryman" and Melissa Queen's "At First Rain," and "Girls Named for Flowers" to be published in the inaugural issue of Foothill: Journal of Poetry from the Claremont University Press.

Art + Poetry + Prose II

Announcement for 11-01-2011

On Friday, November the 4th from 6pm to 9pm, join hosts Louise O'Rourke and Kelly Kathleen Ferguson as well as readers Jolynn Baldwin, Kristin LeMay, Jaswinder Bolina, Traci O' Connor, and Melissa Queen at "Art + Poetry + Prose II," a fine arts show highlighting the collaborative works of the MFAs at Ohio University.

This show will be hosted in building 19 at The Ridges. There will be signs to guide visitors to the event. Food and mixers will be provided. Cocktail (i.e. Mad Men) attire will be celebrated.

Melanie Lee’s Dissertation Defense

Announcement for 10-27-2011

On Monday, October the 31 at 9 a.m. in Ellis Hall, room 113, Melanie Lee will defend her dissertation titled "Reconceptualizing Masculinized L/logos, Re (Image)ining the Rhetorical Feminine in Composition." Her dissertation is the first hybrid manuscript of its kind at Ohio University. She questions the absence of rhetorical feminine authority from our Western tradition in light of ancient rhetorics that show woman rhetors engaging in epideictic, deliberative, and forensic performativity long before Aristotle taxonomizes these terms. She suggests that our rhetorical origins may be more pictorial than textual; our rhetoric and composition is performative; and our visions of rhetorical authority should be androgynous and polymorphic.

Apply to Graduate School Advising Panel

Announcement for 10-26-2011

The Graduate Placement committee is holding an advising session on applying to graduate school next Friday, November 4 from 1:00-2:30 pm in Ellis 113. We encourage all MA students to attend.

There will be a panel of faculty from Composition and Rhetoric, Creative Writing, and Literature available for questions. Also, a few sample materials will be distributed in the meeting.

Ferguson is currently enrolled in the PhD program for creative nonfiction.

Dustin Faulstick Awarded the Edith Wharton Society Essay Prize

Announcement for 09-13-2011

Doctoral student in literature Dustin Faulstick has been named the winner of the Edith Wharton Society Essay Prize, an annual award given for the best unpublished essay on Edith Wharton by a beginning scholar, for his essay, "‘He that Loveth Silver Shall Not be Satisfied with Silver’: Reconsidering the Connection between _The House of Mirth_ and Ecclesiastes." The prize includes a cash award of $250 and publication of the essay in an upcoming issue of the Edith Wharton Review. In the spring, Dustin won the department's Emily Tice Award for the same essay.

MA Candidates Attending PhD Programs This Fall, 2011

Announcement for 07-05-2011

PhD candidate discussed in popular writing blog

Announcement for 02-22-2011

Graduate Student Publications

Announcement for 02-18-2011

Ohio University well represented in Houghton-Mifflin’s Best American Essays 2010

Announcement for 10-14-2010

Cynthia Robinson to be Published in Sigma Tau Delta Journal

Announcement for 09-15-2010

According to Cynthia, "The piece is about the relationship with my family, and more closely with my father and sister, and how it all seems quite blurry to me as I look back through the veil of childhood memories."
Congratulations on the upcoming publication!

Announcement: New issue of Sphere available

Announcement for 06-01-2009

The new issue of the student journal Sphere is now available. Copies can be obtained at the Sphere office on the first floor of Ellis Hall.

Members of Sigma Tau Delta receive honors

Announcement for 05-27-2009

Jennifer Dorsey, Krista Baddour and Matt Townsley were recently honored by the International English Honor Society, Sigma Tau Delta. Jennifer Dorsey received the Sigma Tau Delta junior scholarship for the 2009-10 academic year. Krista Baddour was awarded $100 for her scholarship application essay, and Matt Townsley's short story, "Jarek," was selected for publication in this year’s issue of the Sigma Tau Delta Creative Writing Journal, The Rectangle.